In a typical on-line transaction between a plurality of clients and one or more servers in a server pool, the client applications may send a voluminous number of very brief messages or requests (often tens of thousands of data packets each less than 32 k in size) that have to be processed by a particular server in the server pool. The clients and servers work independently (asynchronously) of one another, and the transmission of data by the network connecting client and server is asynchronous as well, as the data packets are sent in a message forwarding scheme. It would be advantageous in such an I/O asynchronous world if a collection of messages could be given "context" so that a specific server could service the collection of messages in as expeditious manner as possible, without having to resort to costly and time-consuming look-up and queuing processes every time a message was received, as in the prior art. One attempt to solve this problem is to provide the messages, server and client applications with information to establish a sort of temporary dedicated connection between server and client. The present invention is directed towards such a "context-sensitive dialog."
Other programs have attempted to provide for context sensitive dialogs ("pathsends"), such as Tuxedo, Encino, and CPIC (the protocol for some of these programs can be found in publications by the XOpen standard committee), but the present invention provides for a novel and improved dialog that has numerous advantages over any prior efforts.